Not ready to be thrown back into social activity again. Just reading the more than 300 emails that accumulated while I was on vacation last week made me anxious. I write "300" like it's a lot, but it's a pittance compared to the mass that accumulates over non-holiday weeks. Last week was dead at the office with most people on vacation, and today was a light day: just one dial-in meeting and no deadlines. Even so, the tedium was formidable. It doesn't matter how much of it is, it's always the same. More doesn't make it interesting, it only makes it stressful.

I'm surprised it's been so easy to avoid browsing the web. I thought it would be most difficult at first and then easier the longer I abstained. Now, I think it will become more difficult the more I settle back into work.

Today, for the first time, I had to stop myself from mindlessly opening the browser to search for something—Facebook, the news, any five-second distraction—while I waited for my work computer to negotiate the release of a file from a document storage site somewhere. By not browsing, I'm forced to sit while I wait for 2 seconds or 15 seconds or more—it's unpredictable. Doing nothing. It's mindnumbingly tedious and also unexpectedly stressful waiting for sites and folders on remote servers to open. You click, you wait for the click to process on the remote site, a dialogue box opens asking for your password. You enter the password, you wait for the instructions to process, then downloading begins. It's small: a spreadsheet. But it seems the instructions must pass through many hands, like traveling to a third-world country and having to consult the local bureacracy for help with your conditions of travel. It isn't that the network is slow, it's that speed depends on every process to work quickly. And the more steps, or processes, required to be able to actually access the file, the more inefficient it becomes.